This is Why Animojis Might Just be Pointless For Indians

Apple’s latest and greatest flagship, the iPhone X has one defining feature that might get most of you addicted to it as soon as you start using it. Well, if you haven’t guessed it already, we’re talking about Animojis, and as the name suggests, it’s nothing but animated emojis. These are made possible by the new TrueDepth camera system that’s capable mapping more than 50 facial muscles in real-time. When you use it for the first time, you’ll suddenly feel the desire to keep using it and share all your weirdest facial expressions with your friends.

Speaking about sharing, Animoji is a feature that’s baked right into Apple’s own iOS and Mac-exclusive iMessage service. As long as your contacts are on iMessage, you’ll be able to easily record 10-second Animoji clips and share it with your friends even if they don’t have an iPhone X. Well, the iMessage service is extremely popular in the United States, where most of the people use Apple’s iPhones and MacBooks, but that’s not really the case for a country like India. Here, a vast majority of the people use Android phones as their daily driver, and although some of them use iPhones, they don’t make use of the iMessage service, just because almost all their friends, family members and colleagues are not on the platform.

In India, nearly everyone with smartphones make use of WhatsApp as their primary messaging platform to stay in touch with their loved ones, and unfortunately, Animojis simply cannot be accessed on it. Sure, you could still record Animojis and save it to your camera roll just in case you wanted to see your own weird expressions, but this can get boring real quick. The whole point of having Animojis on your iPhone X is to share it with your friends and have fun, and therefore, the feature is totally pointless for Indians due to iMessage’s lack of popularity in India. Sure, you can also use third party apps to record Animojis and then, share it as a video on other platforms but that ruins the experience. It’s just not seamless enough.

Well, there are two ways to get around this. Apple could try expanding iMessage to Android or make Animojis available to third-party developers, but if you ask me if they’ll ever do this, I won’t be optimistic about it.